Katrien Pype, KU Leuwen: Of Masters and Machines: Anthropological Reflections on Invention and Intelligence

The Institute of Social Anthropology invites you to the 4th JJ Bachofen Lecture: Basic Questions of Anthropology.

This year‘s JJ Bachofen lecture considers anthropological approaches to the rela­tionship between human beings and the material world, especially the worlds hu­mans create. Around the globe we are wit­nessing unprecedented forms of „making“, of people inventing, recycling and repai­ring, with or without highly advanced technological apparatuses. In this lecture, Katrien Pype looks at the engagements between society and materiality in terms of belonging, represen­tation and communication, but she also wants to pay attention to the moral panics that undergird collective and individual choices when confronted with man-made machi­nes that become too smart, and at times, that appear beyond the control of their creators and/or users. The presentation will situate the „homo faber“ of electronic modernity, or man who „makes“, fabricates, in a world governed by high-tech devices, within a longue durée of scholarship on the socio-cultural contours of creativity and knowledge, and on the ever-changing configurations of nature and culture.

Katrien Pype is a research professor at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa at KU Leuven University and an ho­norary research fellow at the Department of African Studies & Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. Katrien Pype‘s main research interests include popular culture, media and technology in urban DR Congo. She co-founded the CongoRe­searchNetwork (CRN) and currently runs a comparative research project on techno­logy and the city in DR Congo and Kenya. Among many other publications, she au­thored The Making of the Pentecostal Me­lodrama. Religion, Media, and Gender in Kinshasa (2012) and co-edited Ageing in Africa. Spaces and Practices of Care (2016).

The lecture will be followed by a reception (apéro). Everybody is welcome!

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